by Jason Miller
“This way, slick.”
I started to ask a question, but he was already gone, jogging off again. I gave chase. That was easier said than done. Black #5 was a two-shaft outfit with a surface area about the size of ten football fields laid end to end. By the time I finally hobbled up to Jeep waiting behind a Quonset hut, my still-recovering legs were screaming just a little less urgently than my lungs.
“Hey, slow down, asshole,” I said, although the big man had already stopped moving. “What’s the rush?”
Jeep aimed a finger, and I saw. Highway Barrel and one of the muscle dudes. Ripper’s owner, I realized. Someone had moved several giant rubbish containers near one of the shafts, probably to hold used-up or trashed equipment brought up from the bottom. Highway Barrel was busy filling it with the bodies of dead dogs. Muscle Dude was sitting on one of the containers, smoking a hogleg joint. He didn’t want to help. Highway Barrel was huffing and gasping, and his sweat made him look like he’d been dipped in cooking oil, but Muscle Dude didn’t care. He was indifferent to suffering, human and inhuman both.
Jeep said, “Time to gather a little information. Maybe bust some heads.”
“I’m for that. The head-busting thing, especially. Who gets to be the bad cop?”
Jeep thought about it.
“How about no good cop, bad cop? How about just two crazy redneck motherfuckers?”
“Sounds like a scheme.”
Highway Barrel wasn’t happy to see two strangers approach, but at least he didn’t open fire. That was something. Muscle Dude puffed away on his hogleg. That was something, too. I admit, the guy worried me a little. He was too calm, one. Two, he was as big as a bank vault. I’ll fight just about anything human, but Muscle Dude looked like he’d just rolled off the assembly line at the Mack factory.
“What’s up, amigos?” he said. “Come to help bury the collateral damage?”
Highway Barrel glared at him. The boy didn’t notice glares. Highway Barrel didn’t want it to go to waste. It was a dandy of a glare. He turned it toward us.
“What do you want, men? Fight’s over. Show’s done. Time to vanish into the night.”
“We know.” I showed him my hands. He didn’t relax. He didn’t add my name to his Christmas card list or ask to be Facebook friends. I turned to Muscle Dude. “Hey, sorry about your dog.”
He shook his head. “Don’t be. Fucking thing was a loser from day one.”
“What do you want?” Highway Barrel.
“What’s your name?”
“Fuck you. That’s my name.”
“I’m Slim,” I said, ignoring him. “This is Jeep.”
Muscle Dude laughed. The veins on his neck crawled around.
“Oh, how I love this part of the world, man.”
“What do you want?” Highway Barrel again. His hands twitched. I wondered when he’d remember he was armed. “You’re cops, aren’t you? Oh, Lord have mercy, Jesus Christ.”
Muscle Dude stiffened. He didn’t like that we might have been cops. I don’t know how he felt about Jesus. Probably it was a troubled relationship. He hopped down from the container.
“We’re not the police,” I said. “But we are looking for someone.”
“And you’re gonna help us,” Jeep added.
Highway Barrel sucked his lower lip. His upper was covered with tiny beads of sweat.
“Who?”
“A. Evan Cleaves,” I said. “And his gang.”
The little guy took a step back like I’d take a swing at him. He wasn’t wrong. I was about to.
“No. Uh-uh. No fucking way.”
“Just tell us, and we’ll be on our way.”
“I can’t.”
Jeep said to me, “I knew he wouldn’t tell us.”
“Hey, you were right. I was wrong. What can I say?”
“You want me to take care of these two, Carlos?” Muscle Dude finished his joint. He pitched away the roach and flexed his muscles. Jeep laughed at him.
“Pretty,” he said. “There’s almost nothing you can’t inject these days.”
“Shut up,” Highway Barrel hissed.
Jeep ignored him.
“About that dog of yours, son,” he said.
“Shut up,” Highway Barrel hissed. “Please.”
“It’s like I said, man,” said Muscle Dude, “fucking garbage.”
The boy sprang like a jolt of lightning. He was so fast he knocked over his bud. Highway Barrel went down on the gravel pad with a shriek. I caught a hard knife-hand strike to the shoulder and dropped to one knee. But the boy didn’t want me. He wanted Jeep. Jeep wanted him. It was a match made in heaven. The two men collided like dogs in the ring, both growling. I looked up. Highway Barrel was fumbling with the big .45. He’d finally remembered it.
I hit him hard enough to make him forget it again. I hit him with a snapper of a right, then spun and side-kicked him into the garbage cans. As he flailed over backward, I ended up with the .45 in my hand.
“Stay down, you idiot,” I said.
He didn’t want to stay down. They never want to stay down. He might have been a little guy, but he was strong as a brown bear. And none too bright. I waved his own gun under his nose, but he kept coming. He kicked my right leg with the silver cap toe of his Western boot. But that was pretty much his only move. I backed out, stepped quickly under his slow right hook, and came up again with a right hook to his balls. I followed this with a jump kick to his chest—a little like targeting the broad side of a billboard—and an elbow to the face that dropped him in a pile. He looked up at me and held out a hand.
“I don’t like fighting,” he said, spitting blood.
“You’re shitting me.”
“What?”
“You don’t like fighting? You’re the MC of a goddamn dogfighting ring.”
“I mean human fighting.”
I reached down to pull him upright. My plan was to beat him to death, administer CPR, then beat him to death again, but just then I got hit hard from behind and lost my feet.
Not on purpose, either. Jeep and Muscle Dude were engaged in some serious hand-to-hand combat, and they’d run right into us. For a moment I worried that Jeep was getting the worst of it. Muscle Dude’s bulges weren’t merely ornamental after all. And he’d been trained to fight. Two quick roundhouse kicks upside Jeep’s head sent the big man staggering before a beauty of a spinning stiff-leg to the midsection that would have split open a football took him off his feet altogether. But they don’t make them much tougher than Jeep Mabry, and flash and high kicks aren’t any match for plain old country-boy meanness. When the big man found his footing again and raised up into the light, he was actually grinning. Lashing out, he caught Muscle Dude by his short curly hair and drove the boy’s face down into his knee. Then he unleashed a spinning kick of his own, a whirling arc that met the side of Muscle Dude’s head and sounded roughly like a sledgehammer smashing an overripe melon. The kid should have done the smart thing and taken a nap. But when he came up again, this time with a boot knife in his hand, and lunged forward, he ran full-force into Jeep’s jump front kick, a shot that sent the boy end over end one too many times. He skidded on the rain-slicked lip of the shaft head and plunged, headfirst, into the hole. He didn’t even scream.
Carlos did, though. He screamed bloody murder. And he screamed even louder when Jeep hauled him from the ground and dragged his terrified ass to the hole.
“Last chance,” he said.
“A. Evan,” I said to Highway Barrel. I touched Jeep on the forearm, trying to hold him together. I might as well have been touching a lead statue.
“Woodrat Road,” Carlos whimpered. “They’ve got a hideout place in Woodrat Road. Near Pyramid and the park.”
“You know it?” Jeep asked, still looking at the little man, digging holes with his eyes.
“Yeah,” I replied, because the question was for me. “I know it.”
Jeep tossed the little man aside like a used hanky. He lay on his f
ace near the garbage bag of dead pit bulls, whimpering softly. At least he had sympathy for something.
16.
WE DROVE THROUGH THE NIGHT. WEST AND SOUTH, INTO the hills. The dark world blurred. This was rough country. Trail of Tears State Forest jumped up and swallowed the land. No one wanted to live out there. There wasn’t any moon, and the roads all ran headlong into black holes. Finally, I broke out of my thoughts and broke the silence.
“Here’s the part I don’t get.”
“Tell me.”
“If the Cleaveses are up to their necks in the dogging business, and it looks like they are, why hire me in the first place? Why not just kill Reach themselves, snatch Shelby Ann, and go on about their miserable lives? For that matter, why bother with the dog in the first place?”
“Doggers are like breeders everywhere,” Jeep said. “Always looking for a prize line. But yeah, I saw her picture. In terms of dogging, she wasn’t anything too special.”
I nodded, hating it, hating the bloodless math of it.
“So why her, then?”
“Maybe there’s something else special about her?” Jeep said. “Or maybe it was just to fuck with your buddy Reach?”
“All right. So maybe it’s a simple matter of clipping the competition. We’re right back to the first question. Why hire me?”
“Don’t know,” said Jeep. We thought about it a bit more. Probably neither of us was going to give Sherlock Holmes a run for his money. Finally, Jeep said, “Convenience, maybe. Or maybe they just like other people to do their dirty work for them.”
“Hundred thousand bucks could pay for a lot of dirty work. Especially when you’ve already got a pair of psychos like Bundy and Arlis Harvel at your disposal.”
“True.”
“I can’t figure it out,” I said. “In fact, it only makes sense if . . .”
Jeep nodded.
“The Cleaveses didn’t kill Dennis Reach,” he finished for me.
“Sonofabitch,” I said. It’s amazing how dumb a grown man can be. “They think I did it.”
“Which only leaves one question.”
“Who did kill Reach?”
“Yep.”
There wasn’t much mystery to it. The Colt rifle, Reach’s words to me the night he was shot, J.T. hiding out and hauling ass. It all added up to one name, and I’d like to say I was more than just a little surprised. But I sure as hell was embarrassed.
Carol Ray.
Jeep must have been reading my mind.
“Better see if we can find her, slick,” he said. “It might go a long way toward getting you out of your hole with Lindley.”
“The hole’s pretty deep at this point,” I said. “And like to get deeper. Frankly, though, I’m more worried about the FBI.”
“Fuck it,” Jeep said. “If we’re going to get our assholes in a knot, let’s at least have something to show for it.”
“And what might that be?”
“A. Evan Cleaves’s nut sack, stapled to my living room wall.”
“A. Evan still attached?”
“Briefly.”
And on we drove into the night.
WOODRAT ROAD RAN RIGHT UP TO THE DOORSTEP OF PYRAMID State Park. Way back, the area was all strip land, and even to this day the overgrown tailings left behind by the Pyramid Coal Company form a kind of gently rolling grassland. Denmark was just west, Galum Creek a little to the north. The Cleaveses’ hideout was in between, inside a dark, wet hollow surrounded by chinkapin and hackberry trees and a humid gloom. The moon finally appeared, low on the horizon, and the silver light on the rim of the hills was kind of pretty. Then A. Evan’s hideout jumped out of the landscape and punched pretty in the nose. Here the country dove toward lowland and wet muck. The insects attacked us like a little air force, and the hot kiss of the summer damp laughed in our faces. But the trailer was worse. It was a geriatric fiberglass doublewide whose only saving grace seemed to be that it had a roof and four walls. Maybe not even that. Any port in a storm, I guess, but a newspaper story about a tornado would have torn A. Evan’s trailer to confetti and thrown the confetti into the next county.
“Why not just live in a cave?” Jeep said.
“At least there’s not a dog in the yard.”
“Yeah. Ain’t that a kick in the ass?”
“Speaking of ass-kicks, how you want to handle this?”
“With our usual charm.”
Our usual charm involved broken doors and red-hot gun barrels. Or at the very least kicking anyone’s ass who looked at us crooked. I thought about it.
“How about we try the bedroom window first?” I said.
“Your caper, slick.”
The backyard was a mud hole. There was a pile of abandoned pickup trucks in various stages of advanced oxidation. It was like a museum. There were kennels—shit- but not dog-filled—and a device, wild with copper tubes, that could only have been A. Evan’s attempt at a still. Like he didn’t have enough vices.
I half-expected someone to come out of the dark at us, chainsaw in hand, babbling some sort of wild-ass, backwoods glossolalia, but maybe I’ve just seen too many Hollywood horror movies. The back door was missing. It was just a rectangular hole in the fiberglass. As a security measure, someone had leaned an old fishing boat against the hole.
I said, “Now that is something you don’t see every day.”
Moving the boat seemed like a bad idea. We went around front again. I don’t guess we were going to win awards for decisive action, and I was glad there were no men’s magazine writers around to take it all down. We climbed the steps. The front door was a door in name only. It was the kind of door other doors make fun of for goldbricking. We gave it a mean look and it opened. I looked at Jeep. Jeep looked at me. That was about as calm as things got.
Jeep went ahead of me. The room was dark and quiet and small. There was a hallway to our left, and some doors, all closed. The bedroom was right. It smelled like someone had roasted wild animals alive in their pelts over an open flame. I didn’t know what that was, but I knew I didn’t like it. It burned the nose and the eyes. It made you want to tear out your hair and cry and run away into the hills. Candlelight from the bedroom cast a shape around the corner and on the wall. A big yellow square. We slowly but deliberately headed for that shape. We snuck like the Scooby Gang. Suddenly the quiet got quieter. Then there was a sound like a hard breath, and the yellow square went away. Someone had blown out the candle.
“Well, shit,” Jeep said.
Something thundered toward us, out of the shadows. Sheldon Cleaves, I realized. Or a wild animal wearing a Sheldon suit. He ran at us, naked, howling across the small space with his unit flying around free like a shaved mouse. He had a sword in his hand. His pecker was out, and he was armed with a sword. Saber, I guess it was. Jeep did the sensible thing and hit the deck. The saber whistled through the air. It clipped off the brim of his ball cap and lodged in the metal flashing around the doorframe.
Sheldon grunted and tugged, but the blade was stubborn. I didn’t blame it; I didn’t want to work for Sheldon Cleaves, either. Jeep jumped to his feet. He hit Sheldon in the ribs and kidneys. Sheldon grunted, but kept working on the sword. It was an impressive show of single-mindedness. I left him to Jeep, turned, and started in a run to the bedroom. I didn’t get far. Two shapes appeared in front of me—two big naked shapes, a couple of Sheldon’s White Dragon buds, I guess. I didn’t have time to ponder what all that nakedness meant. The air went hot around me. Something flashed bright in my eyes, and I fell over backward and broke a chair.
I’ll never know how, but when one of the big men cut loose with what looked like an Ingram .380 machine pistol, he managed to miss everything but the sofa, the windows, and some squirrel skulls. Sheldon forgot his sword and dove through the front door like Buster Keaton doing a silent film stunt. The second big man hit the deck, too, and rolled toward the kitchen, knocking over barstools and a thicket of foot-high bongs as he went. He swept his own Ingram across t
he room and puckered the wood paneling with black anuses.
Jeep’s .50-caliber Magnum roared. It hit the air conditioner on the wall opposite and tossed it into the yard. He fired again, and a fist-size hole appeared in the particleboard. When I uncovered my head and opened my eyes, the room had gotten emptier. The White Dragons had disappeared back into the hallway. One on either side.
“Back out,” Jeep said to me.
I backed out. Sheldon was still at the top of the stairs, still gathering himself. I kicked him off the steps and to the ground. He stood back up, holding his balls. I guess he’d landed on them when he dove out of the trailer.
“You motherfucker,” he said. Meaning me, I guess. He looked ridiculous, standing there cupping his balls. Then he smiled. We turned.
One of the Dragons was standing in the trailer’s doorway. He aimed his gun at us. I didn’t hear the shot, just its echo. It came from somewhere along the dark ridgeline, too far away to see muzzle flash. It hit the Dragon in the top of the head. His brains jumped out of his skull and landed in his open palms. What was left of him looked at them for a moment in confusion. I dove under the steps. Jeep followed.
“Who?” Jeep asked. I shook my head. I didn’t know.
I didn’t have the time or breath to answer anyway. The second Dragon appeared. He had some loyalty on him. I guess you had to give him that. He ran screaming into the yard after his brother-in-arms. He picked a piece of him off the ground. Another shot cracked just over our heads. The boy’s right arm vanished in a red haze just beneath the shoulder joint. I think he opened his mouth to scream, but as he did, another slug knocked the top half of his head from his body, and what was left of him folded up and crumpled to the ground in a shower of blood and brain matter.
“Fucking sniper,” Jeep grunted. “In the dark, no less. Night-vision scope?”
“Got to be. I can barely see five feet in front of me, and those shots came from the hill.”
“Some of your heavy-hitting buddies,” Jeep said.
“Inside.”
We dove for it. Jeep dragged Sheldon with us. We made the trailer just as another shot sounded and the light fixture by our head exploded. We dove inside, ate floor. I shut the door with my foot.